Tuesday, February 13, 2018

a different sort of fake news

This is a hoot. What's wrong with this picture?


Journalism continues to beclown itself.



5 comments:

Charles said...

Is this real? This can't be real.

The last time I went to a P.F. Chang's was when I was visiting a friend out in California. That had to be at least ten years ago. Maybe more.

Kevin Kim said...

You could be right: this could be a Photoshopped image designed to catch rightie suckers (I saw this on rightie-heavy Gab.ai). Stay tuned: we might soon find out this was a prank/troll.

Kevin Kim said...

For what it's worth, the news story was quoted by Drudge, so if this is a prank, then Drudge is a huge sucker. The news story itself is from the Chicago Tribune, which says:

Pyeongchang is a mountainous county 110 miles southeast of Seoul in South Korea, and the host of the 2018 Winter Olympics.

P.F. Chang’s is an Asian-inspired chain restaurant with 210 U.S. locations, including ones in Chicago, Lombard, Northbrook, Orland Park and Schaumburg.

PyeongChang and P.F. Chang’s are not the same thing, and beyond the fact that they both begin with the letter P and end in “Chang,” they have little in common.

This distinction, however, appears to have eluded WLS-Ch.7’s news team, which on Saturday morning accidentally broadcast a report about the political backdrop to the Winter Olympics, illustrated with the graphic, “P.F. Chang 2018.”

Jayme Nicholas, a spokesperson for the ABC affiliate in Chicago, told Inc. that the goof was the result of a mix-up. The graphic was created for a different “satirical piece” put together on Friday by sports anchor Mark Giangreco in which viewers were encouraged to invent their own Olympic sports, but it was mistakenly also used for the serious news story read on Saturday by weekend anchor Mark Rivera, Nicholas said.

Nicholas apologized for the gaffe, which is the kind of screw-up that makes all of us in the news business touch wood and utter the phrase, “There but for the grace of God go I.”


Also: is it my imagination, or are there only four Olympic rings in that logo?

Charles said...

This makes sense: "The graphic was created for a different “satirical piece” put together on Friday by sports anchor Mark Giangreco in which viewers were encouraged to invent their own Olympic sports, but it was mistakenly also used for the serious news story read on Saturday by weekend anchor Mark Rivera, Nicholas said."

That would also explain the four rings versus five. Chalk it up to carelessness and searching around for a graphic--any graphic--when putting together a piece.

Kevin Kim said...

re: four rings

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.